Hosting a Node.js application on Google Compute Engine

We'll implement a Node.js application (http://keystonejs.com/) on Google Compute Engine (GCE). GCE is Google's offering for all IaaS needs. Our simple application is built on expressjs and MongoDB. expressjs is a simple web application framework for Node.js and MongoDB is a document-oriented NoSQL database. KeystoneJS also uses a templating engine along with Node.js and MongoDB.

The architecture of our recipe is depicted as follows:

Single-tiered Node.js application on GCE

We will follow a single-tiered approach to host the application and the database on the same VM. Later in this chapter, we'll host the same Node.js application on Google App Engine and Kubernetes Engine.

Note

You'll be using the following services and others for this recipe: 

 

• GCE
• Google Cloud logging
• Google Cloud Source Repositories

Getting ready

The following are the initial setup verification steps to be taken before the recipe can be executed:

1. Create or select a GCP project...